I stopped at a coffee bar on my way to Lake Shore Drive for a large orange juice and an even larger cappuccino. It was almost seven now; the morning commute had begun in earnest, but I still made it to Hyde Park before seven-thirty.
I gave a perfunctory nod to the guard at the entrance to the Hyde Park Bank building. It wasn’t the same man Fepple had warned against me on Friday. This man gave me a cursory glance over his newspaper but didn’t challenge me: I was professionally dressed, I knew where I was going. To the sixth floor, where I pulled on latex gloves to start work on Fepple’s locks. I was so tense, listening for the elevator, that it took me a moment to realize the locks were already open.
I slipped into the office, snarling as I tripped once more on the torn corner of linoleum. Fepple was behind his desk. In the pale light coming through the window, I thought he’d fallen asleep in his chair. I hesitated at the door, then decided to put a bold face on it, wake him, force him to hand over the Sommers file. I switched on the overhead light. And saw that Fepple would never speak to anyone again. His mouth was missing. The side of his head, the carpet of freckled skin, nothing left of them but a smear of bone and brain and blood.
I sat abruptly on the floor. Head between my knees. Even with my nose muffled I thought I could smell blood. My gorge rose. I willed my mind to other matters: I couldn’t add my vomit to the crime scene.
I don’t know how long I sat like that, until voices in the hall made me realize how precarious my position was: in an office with a dead man, with picklocks in my pocket and latex gloves on my hands. I stood up, so fast that my head swam again, but I shook off the faintness and turned the dead bolt to lock myself in.
Trying to make it a clinical exercise, I edged around the desk to look at Fepple. A gun had fallen to the floor just below where his right arm dangled. I squinted at it: a twenty-two SIG Trailside. So he had shot himself? Because whatever he’d seen in the Sommers file had unbalanced his mind? His computer was still on, in a suspend state. Suppressing my nausea, I gingerly stretched an arm past his left side, using a picklock to bring up the screen so that I wouldn’t disturb any evidence. A block of text came back to life.
When my father died this was a flourishing agency but I am a failure as an agent. I have watched my sales and profits go in a downward spiral for five years. I thought I could cheat my way out of debt but now that the detective is watching me I’m afraid I would be a failure even at that. I’ve never married, I’ve never known how to attract women, I can’t face myself any longer. I don’t know how to pay my bills. If anyone cares, perhaps my mother, I’m sorry. Howard
I printed it out and stuffed the paper in my pocket. My hands inside their latex gloves were wet. Black spots swam around my eyes. I was very aware of Fepple’s shattered head next to me, but I couldn’t look at it. I wanted to leave the obscene mess, but I might not get another chance to find the Sommers file.
The cabinets were open, which surprised me: when I was here last week, Fepple had made quite a point of unlocking them when he wanted to put the papers away, then promptly locking them again. The third drawer, the one where he’d stuck the Sommers file, was labeled Rick Hoffman’s clients.
The files were jammed into the drawer, some upside down, none in any kind of order. When I pulled out the first file, Barney Williams, I thought I was at the end of the alphabet, but it was followed by Larry Jenks. With an uneasy eye on the clock, I emptied the drawer and replaced the folders one at a time. The Sommers file wasn’t there.
I flipped through the folders looking for anything that related to Sommers. There wasn’t anything in them but copies of policies and payment schedules. About three-quarters of them were closed cases, where the policy was stamped Paid with the date or Lapsed for nonpayment with the date. I looked in the other drawers but found nothing. I took a half dozen of the paid policies: I could get Mary Louise to check on whether they’d been paid to the beneficiary.
I listened uneasily to voices coming from the hall, but I couldn’t leave until I’d looked for the Sommers papers in the mess on the desk. The papers were flecked with bits of blood and brain. I didn’t want to disturb them—an experienced tech could tell in a flash that someone had been searching—but I wanted that file.